In a moment she realized what had delayed him. When he had gone away with the step-ladder, he had on a well-worn suit in which, behind locked doors, he had been working all the afternoon at the decorations of the Tree. Now he came back ceremoniously dressed; the rest of the night was to be in her honor. It had always been so on this anniversary of their bridal night. They had always dressed for it; the children now in their graves had been dressed for it; the children in bed upstairs were regularly dressed for it; the house was dressed for it; the servants were dressed for it; the whole life of that establishment had always been made to feel by honors and tendernesses and gayeties that this was the night on which he had married her and brought her home. As her eyes swept over him she noted quite as never before how these anniversaries had not taken his youth away, but had added youth to him; he had grown like the evergreen in the middle of the room--with increase of trunk and limbs and with larger tides of strength surging through him toward the master sun. There were no ravages of married life in him. Time had merely made the tree more of a tree and made his youth more youth. She took in momentary details of his appearance: a moisture like summer heat along the edge of his yellow hair, started by the bath into which he had plunged; the freshness of the enormous hands holding the manuscript; the muscle of the forearm bulging within the dress-coat sleeve. Many a time she had wondered how so perfect an animal as he had ever climbed to such an elevation of work; and then had wondered again whether any but such an animal ever in life does so climb--shouldering along with him the poise and breadth of health and causing the hot sun of the valley to shine on the mountain tops. Finally she looked to see whether he, thus dressed in her honor, thus but the larger youth after all their years together, would return her greeting with a light in his eyes that had always made them so beautiful to her--a light burning as at a portal opening inward for her only. His eyes rested on his manuscript. He brought it wrapped and tied in the true holiday spirit--sprigs of cedar and holly caught in the ribands; and he now lifted and held it out to her as a jeweller might elevate a casket of gems. Then he stepped forward and put it on the table at her elbow. “For you!” he said reverently, stepping back. There had been years when, returning from a tramp across the country, he would bring her perhaps nothing but a marvellous thistle, or a brilliant autumn leaf for her throat. “For you!” he would say; and then, before he could give it to her, he would throw it away and take her in his arms. Afterwards she would pick up the trifle and treasure it. “For you!” he now said, offering her the treasure of his year’s toil and stepping back.